Cons:

The AC/DC LIVE: Rock Band Track Pack offered us the potential for the shortest review in GameSpy history: As a standalone game, it's a barebones version of Rock Band with 18 live AC/DC tracks, of which you'll probably only care about 10. There's a code for a one-time export to your hard drive so you can play the songs in other Rock Band games. The live versions are pretty clean, although the padding commonly associated with live performances occasionally hurts them as gameplay levels. Oh, and it's only available via Wal-Mart for $40, which is probably about twice as expensive as it should be. There are some true rock classics here, but unless you're a total AC/DC fanatic, it's hard to justify the premium cost.

AC/DC LIVE includes 18 live performances from a 1991 Donington, UK gig. At the time, the band was touring in support of "The Razor's Edge" album, which included "Thunderstruck," "Fire Your Guns" and "Moneytalks," all part of the setlist here. The show covers songs from both the Bon Scott and Brian Johnson eras (with Johnson obviously performing all the vocals here), and the live tracks are both fairly clean and generally stick close to the originals.

The best part of the pack is that it includes all the band's iconic songs: "Back in Black," "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap," "Hells Bells," "You Shook Me All Night Long," "T.N.T.," "Highway to Hell" and "For Those About to Rock (We Salute You)." These versions generally sound so good that casual fans might not even realize they're live versions, at least not initially, and they're outstanding additions to the Rock Band family.

On the flip side, you're also getting saddled with a number of tracks you might not be all that interested in. Was anyone really clamoring for "The Jack" or "Hell Ain't a Bad Place to Be"? The live version of "High Voltage" is so dragged out that it's completely un-fun to play on any instrument. And while AC/DC fanatics might be thrilled to play "Whole Lotta Rosie" or "Jailbreak," they're songs most of us could easily live without. It's been joked that AC/DC has made a career out of playing the same song for 35 years, and after playing through this whole show, you'll understand exactly what that means: Songs start to sound alike at some point, with far more AC/DC here than most of us will ever want to play.

As a standalone game, AC/DC LIVE is sort of a barebones hybrid of Rock Band and Rock Band 2. The menus, graphics and basic framework are clearly borrowed from the first Rock Band, but a few things, like the calibration system and talkie-friendly vocals, appear to be from Rock Band 2. All the tracks are unlocked in Quickplay as soon as you load up the game, but there is a basic "career" in which you can play through the 18 songs in the same order as the show, either solo or as a band. Beyond that, don't expect to find much more functionality. There's no World Tour, you can't customize characters, there's no online play (although there's support for local Band Quickplay, Tug of War and Score Duel), nor any online leaderboard. For any of this, you'll have to export the songs to your hard drive and play them in Rock Band or Rock Band 2.

For Rock Band experts, there's plenty of challenge to be found among the 18 tracks across all the instruments. The opening track, "Thunderstruck," starts with a flurry of hammer-ons that may send Angus Young wannabes straight into practice mode. "Dirty Deeds" contains a particularly nasty guitar solo, and every once in a while songs start or end with some freeform noodling that can be hard to get a grasp on. On drums, a lot of patterns tend to look the same, but faster songs like "Fire Your Guns" can be a real workout. In fact, the live version of "Let There Be Rock" is so ridiculously fast that you'll probably end up with a right arm like Popeye if you play it on a daily basis. The vocals are challenging for a whole different reason: They're rarely straight melody lines, and continually shift from "talkies" to tough-to-decipher warbling.

All of these details are just a long way of restating what we said at the start of this review: There are some great AC/DC tracks here which would make a fantastic addition to any Rock Band collection, but you'll have to pay a premium to get them, including a lot of songs you're probably not interested in. Unless you're an absolute AC/DC fanatic, you're probably better served waiting to pick this up on sale sometime down the road.